Avanza is one of the largest banks in Sweden, and in their monthly blogg, they're noticing a big movement where Swedes are selling their American funds and shares, to buy Swedish/European instead.

The governor of the Central Bank of Sweden comments our payment systems.

Here’s an AI translation of the text into English:

"Given the geopolitical situation, it is important to create European systems in a number of areas. This is according to Riksbank Governor Erik Thedéen in an interview with Ekot’s Saturday program, where he emphasizes that Sweden’s payment systems should not be as dependent on the USA as they have been. As an example, he points out that the two dominant credit card issuers, Mastercard and Visa, are American. 'It is probably wise to consider that we should also have European or Swedish systems that function in case the American ones do not,' he says. According to the central bank governor, Swish is 'a certain complement.' He also highlights that other countries, such as Denmark, have their own national credit cards."

I'm not saying anything about this particular case, but this shows that Microsoft and other US tech giants have the power to politically disrupt or hurt a country, or in our case, a whole continent.

If the US/tech giants for whatever reason decide that Europe needs to be punished, they can hurt us really bad by just turning all our digital services down, which could potentially cause chaos depending on the scale.

Europe needs to start using European alternatives to American IT services!

Edit: Just to be clear - I'm not posting this to discuss the Israel/Palestine conflict, or whether what Microsoft did here was right or wrong. I'm trying to raise awareness of a potential dangerous dependancy of American tech, and am trying to promote European tech in a group called Buy European.